Daniel Boone’s weary John Butkus, looking every bit like a coach who’d just taken a beating, stood in the Giant Center corridor Monday night while his team held a players-only meeting in its locker room.

“We haven’t really had a whuppin’ like this before,” Butkus said after a lopsided District 3-AAA semifinal loss to Steel-High. “So we’re letting them sit in there and hash it out themselves. We have two days to refocus.”

Considering the blurriness Steel-High brought upon Boone in the 85-50 blowout, two days hardly seems like much time.

But the third-seeded Blazers (23-6) seemed confident that Monday night’s mishap would not extend into Thursday’s third-place game with Greecastle-Antrim, site and time to be determined.

“You just go to practice and talk about what you did wrong,” said senior point guard Gavin Williams. “You try to work on those things and try to fix them for the next game.”

From a purely statistical perspective, and based solely on Monday’s derailment, that would make for a whole lot of fixes.

Boone gave the ball away 23 times against the second-seeded Rollers (23-5), who along with Reading High represent as talented a team as the Blazers have faced all season. Most of those turnovers were the product of Steel-High’s tight pressure, spearheaded by swift senior point guard Lance Chisholm.

“We played against Reading a couple of times this year, so we thought we were ready to handle Steel-High’s speed,” Butkus said. “But they were very athletic.”

During the rare moments when the game was played in the halfcourt, Boone scuffled on both ends.

Defensively, it could not stop 6-7 senior forward Josh Proctor, who had game highs of 23 points and 17 rebounds. Instead of its usual man-to-man, Boone played zone most of the way, and never looked comfortable.

“Normally,” Williams said, “our defense dictates our offense.”

Offensively, and this might have been the biggest problem, the Blazers abandoned the slashing cuts and quick passes that lead to their trademarks of easy layups and loads of foul shots.

“The main gist of what we talked about (in the locker room) is that we kind of got out of our style of play,” said senior forward Jimmy McCarthy. “We weren’t intimidated, but we didn’t play our style of basketball. We got behind, and then we kind of just lost it.”

“We were in a little bit of a panic mode in the beginning of the game,” Butkus said, “and it kind of got away from us.”

Boone took a 6-4 lead on Zach Benjamin’s layup 2:03 into the game, then unraveled on both ends. Steel-High manufactured a 16-0 run to go up 20-6. After a quick 8-0 Boone run made it 20-14, the Rollers scored 14 of the next 18, and the rout was on.

Benjamin’s 12 points paced Boone, and McCarthy had nine.

“We’ll see if we can bounce back,” said Butkus, whose Blazers have already sealed a PIAA berth. “I think we’ll be all right. It’s not like we’re done yet.”

“We just have to get ready for Thursday now,” McCarthy said. “We still think we can hang with anybody in the state.”